The attitudes towards foreign language classes diverge widely. Some persons think a language teacher should teach writing and reading predominately while others think creative aspects and speaking are more important. In the following, the role of multiliteracies in the 21st century will be illustrated.
To start with a consensus in this debate, the educational standards across Europe have defined three major goals for foreign language teaching. Central is the development of a basic communicative competence that goes along with a transcultural and a methodological competence. This means that the learner should be able to use the foreign language in different communicative situations and for different purposes. Apart from that, the ability to understand and produce certain texts and being able to participate in social discourses freely, is aimed at.
Further, the learner should develop multimodal literacy because words and images arrive together and thus need to be understood together. To understand words and images, they have to be interpreted, analyzed and set in their specific context. Especially in our digital and modern world, learners need to develop this competence and they need to be able to question things.
What is getting even more important is the communication. Interaction has become multilingual. The social discourse and communication in general has changed rapidly. Writing as a communicative skill developed too. Via online communication or social media, one is constantly available which influences our language. Abbreviations or emojis often replace proper sentences. In addition, all kind of information is consumed – especially in our online world but also in real life – even sometimes unconsciously. This leads us to the next point, namely information literacy.
Information literacy is the noticing and naming of an information and the development of search strategies, source finding, processing data and evaluating. This can for example be practiced in the EFL classroom with the help of research projects or correcting certain statements.
Every student should benefit from multiliteracy in every part of life and these are all aspects of multiliteracy. As mentioned above, the writing process and writing in general has been transformed. Writing as a productive skill is still utterly important but it has to be adapted to the new standards and needs as well. The complex writing process consists of content, text and linguistic know how which has not changed. What has changed is that texts are provided with pictures, diagrams or online links that make the named competences even more important. Additionally, there is a huge offer. Moreover, the purpose and context of writing is not as static as it used to be.
To manage the new challenges, teachers could use more real -life tasks in order to engage their students best. Real -life tasks are more complex and involve many skills. They could as well appear outside the EFL classroom in real life, which makes them that authentic and worthwhile. The discursive processes that resemble real-world situations is perfectly initiated. Teachers therefore need to offer a broad variety of texts and media combinations just as they could occur in real-world contexts. The reflective dimension and different forms of communication need to be included as well.
In conclusion, the basic communicative skills- namely writing and reading- that need to be developed in the EFL classroom are still the same, but they have been extended as a consequence of the social, technological and cultural development. Teachers can react according to that by simply adapting the tasks and not negotiating the fact that foreign language teaching is constantly changing and developing.
Lisa